A communication system can be seen as a facility that enables communication sessions between two or more entities such as user terminal and/or other nodes associated with the communication system. Subscribers, such as the users or end-users, to a communication system may be offered and provided numerous services, such as two-way or multi-way calls, data communication or multimedia services or simply an access to a network, such as the Internet. The services may be offered by an operator of the communication system or by an external service provider.
Examples of communication systems may include fixed line communication systems, such as a public switched telephone network (PSTN), wireless communication systems, e.g. general packet radio service (GPRS), universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS), wireless local area network (WLAN) and so on, and/or other communication networks, such as an Internet Protocol (IP) network and/or other packet switched data networks. Various communication systems may simultaneously be concerned in a connection. An end-user may access a communication network by means of any appropriate user equipment (UE), for example a mobile terminal, such as a mobile station (MS), a cellular phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA) or the like, or other terminals, such as a personal computer (PC), or any other equipment operable according to a suitable network protocol, such as a wireless applications protocol (WAP) or a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). The user equipment may support, in addition to call and network access functions, other services, such as short message service (SMS), multimedia message service (MMS), electronic mail (email), Web service interface (WSI) messaging and voice mail.
A subscriber may have a prepaid account storing payment resources for using services. A certain amount of payment resources may be placed in advance in the prepaid account of the subscriber and an appropriate network element may distribute the resources to the entities requiring prepayment and control balance of the prepaid account.
Services may be charged in different ways depending on the type of the service and service providers, for example. Therefore, a subscriber may not be aware of final costs of using services. The final costs may work out more expensive than the subscriber expected. The subscriber may become reluctant or unwilling to use the services if estimating the final costs is difficult or if the subscriber gets information on the costs with a long delay. In particular, this may cause problems when prepaid accounts are used. The subscriber may not easily know how much payment resources there are left in the prepaid account, especially if the subscriber does not know what shall be charged for the used service. This may lead to reduction in use of all services, even if high charging may relate only to certain services.
In some communication systems, a warning message or similar may be displayed before a connection is established for a subscriber to a requested content service. This may slow down connecting to a service. It may be possible to avoid partly this slowing effect by defining a charging limit below of which a connection may be allowed without the warning message.
In intelligent networks (IN), the network may inform the subscriber before subscriber's prepaid account runs out of payment resources. The network may send information to the subscriber in a voice mail or an SMS or a similar message.
There is a need for improved solutions of providing user equipment information associated with services provided via a communication system.
It shall be appreciated that these issues are not limited to any particular communication environment, but may occur in any appropriate communication system.